Animation Supervisor
Super77 brought me on board to lead the character animation portion of their I.P. LAMO - A three part ecosystem of the game, collectable vinyl figures and AR mobile app. They teamed up with the most popular streamers on twitch including, Ninja, Tim The Tatman, Lirik, Summit 1G, Shroud, Dr. Disrespect, CouRage, Dr. Lupo, Ann Munition, Kitty Plays and Sniper Wolf to name a few.
My responsibilities grew into helping rebuild and supervise the pipeline when they tasked me with creating a universal rig that would work with hundreds of new characters, promotional material, and AR content in the app.
One major challenge was to work with the huge proportion of the head in relation to the thick and stumpy body of the character. These proportions are notoriously difficult to work with in CG but as you can see, we made it work.
App animation with vinyl figure
Gameplay animation
A Truly Universal Rig
The rig features a stretchy ribbon spine and stretchy limbs (all translation-based) along with an advanced, fully expressive 2D facial animation system capable of cross platform integration and lip sync.
My approach to rigging the body was to create it in two parts - A motion system and a separate deformation system. This kept the skeleton that was exported to Unity as an FBX, clean and clear of any funny constraints, stray nulls, or curves, leaving only joints and skin weighted meshes for Unity.
I suggested creating a character named Global Glenn to make the Maya animation pipeline easier to navigate. This way, when the artists and dev's saw a file called "ggln_menu_idleA_001.fbx" they would instantly know that it was GlobalGlenn and therefore could be applied to any character in the game regardless of their unique character skin.
Shamelessly I patterned Global Glenn after myself and created a no-frills costume that I liken to a crash test dummy. His "right-for-red" and blue costume was designed to help the artist/dev identify parts of the body from left to right, just as the control curves do on any good rig. With an easy to read center-line of the body and some subtle texture to the fabric of his shirt, the animator/ rigging artist could identify problematic areas on the character that were being stretched and twisted too far or where weights were being improperly painted.
A practical and utilitarian character made it easy not to confuse anyone at the studio. They understood that they were looking at a placeholder character that did not belong to the game, and could make judgements exclusively on its actions and behaviors.
The Advanced 2D Face Rig
“The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants” was still fresh on my mind from my time at Dreamworks where I had created an After Effects rig for lip sync on the stop motion scenes. By referencing the layout from classic TV animation mouth charts, we could create an image sequence with all of the necessary phonemes and emotional range for each. So I broke out the mouth and eyes into three groups: mouth, pupil and eyelids and went to work creating our phonemes on a 512 px square image plane which could be imported into Maya. It was a beautiful and elegant system.
I referenced Brian Tindall’s book “The Art of Moving Points” to design the mouth shapes. The wide range of emotion that we were able to achieve using the book’s “three curve system” and the “football shape” are a testament to how these principles are truly universal and not software specific. I would highly recommend buying this book to any rigging artist or animator.
For the most accurate animation results I chose to work with stepped keys when selecting the individual face shapes, while letting the position scale and rotation curves fly as splined interpolation.
Here are some voice over samples from the VR app, which can also be seen in my rigging demo reel. I think these samples really show just how robust the facial system was!
The big question was how to transfer animation curves from Maya to Unity with ease and accuracy. I proposed using joints to drive which face shapes would be displayed and or rotated/ scaled/ translated from frames 0-140. This way the animation on the face could be exported simultaneously with the body as an .FBX via the “Game Exporter”. I worked with the vfx & technical director Andrew Mark to ensure that each of the “Set Driven Keys” created in Maya matched identically to the “Set Driven Keys” in Unity. This way, when the animation was exported as an fbx to Unity, each face shape that displayed in Maya, and it's position, rotation and scale would be represented exactly the same when imported into Unity.
Play
It was a pleasure to work so closely with our Art Director and Producer Scott Ulliman to establish the style and overall attitudes of the characters. I’m so thankful for the freedom and ownership he gave me over the personality and style of movement for our characters, which essentially made it an absolute dream job. Thank you Scott!
Any concepts that didn’t make it into the game became an asset for promotional material. If the studio reached out to a celebrity or influencer, they could have a fun animated gif in their inbox. Or we could parlay it into a social media post.
P.S.R. Animation
When we transitioned from PC to mobile with Amazon Games, there was a need to re-animate some of our legacy vehicle and prop animations to have them driven by the mesh’s position, scale, and rotation only. No skinned meshes were allowed unless they were a character’s mesh. At least three team members couldn’t believe that I didn’t use any deformers on the gun, so I knew that it was a successful use of P.S.R. animation.
These vehicle and tower gun animations were originally created in C4D with joints by our vfx and technical director artist Andrew Mark. I was able to emulate them with the same spirit as his original animation, but with no joints, smooth binds, or non linear deformers. Just some good ol’ fashioned offset pivot points using scale Y and counter animating scale Z with some rotate X did the trick.
We were lucky to have Tyler Parkinson churning out beautiful designs like these. They pushed the envelope for what we could do with the rig and I’m very thankful for the challenge.
We were also very lucky to have Laura Lee Cooper model and texture so many of these wild designs. We needed to keep the number of skinned joints to a minimum, so the spooky eyes needed to be animated by position, scale, and rotation only which would keep things nice and light weight, computationally speaking.
Here is yet another example of the usefulness of Brian Tindall’s football shape. The only thing required for the blink was a simple scale Y to open and close the eye, which was nothing more than a low poly plane.
